For anyone not keeping track of UK politics, here is the last few weeks summed up:

Our government has one of the lowest approval ratings ever. Our Prime Minister has the worst approval rating ever. Our Deputy Prime Minister is being investigated for using work computers for pornography acquisition¹. The DUP, the insane Christian fundamentalist party who is keeping Frau Kommandant in charge vetoed the last week’s Brexit negotiations because they refuse to make things as shitty as they were in the 1970s again, so Brexit has stalled. Again. The number of people in poverty has increased by 700,000 (that’s more than 1% of the population). British Industry is at a standstill. More than 3% of the population are now employed in Zero Hours contracts where they are guaranteed a minimum of, you guessed it, zero hours per month.

Black Friday (a new tradition to our shores) saw a whopping 2% of people surveyed by YouGov responding that they bought something in the sales, 78% of people saying that they didn’t, and 14% saying they thought that Black Friday wasn’t even a thing over here; so that capitalist holiday is off to a roaring success.

Visa is estimating that Christmas sales this year are going to be worse than they were in 2008.

The minister in charge of social mobility has quit along with their whole team, citing that our current Government cares so little about the poor that their job is no longer necessary.

The Tory Party is so scared of Labour’s 8-12 point lead in the polls that they’re trying again desperately to say that the Labour Party is divided over the core issue du jour, which happens to be that the Momentum assembly, which is a Socialist core group, is actively threatening moderate Labour ministers, and recently forced a centralist Labour councillor to resign². Because how can Labour be so strong if they’re so divided?

In good news though, I successfully nuked the house so wherever that damn colony of fleas was hiding that managed to attack Boris three times, they’re all dead now. No more itchy kitty.

¹ Hey, at least it was ‘legal pornography’, especially since Frau Kommandant decided to increase the list of forbidden pornographies to include such lame things as breath control and the female orgasm. …Yeah you read that right, technically any porn film that shows a woman coming to climax is illegal in the UK. Yay.

² See now, this didn’t happen. What happened was the centrist councillor was trying to vote for something his constituents hated, so they called for a by-election to get a councillor who didn’t want to vote for the thing they hated. That councillor just happened to be a member of Momentum.

political gerrymandering by the larger companies prevents entrepreneurship

You sure it isn’t all the people complaining about a lack of standards and the possibility of injury or death without sufficient insurance? Though I’m sure regulatory capture is the issue, at least in large part.

That’s usually why the cops shut down a lemonade stand over here. Lack of licensing. Not too long ago a landscaping association was pushing to prosecute unlicensed lawn mowers, those 15 year old kids saving for a car, because they weren’t members of the association.

One of the women accusing Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, Beverly Young Nelson, told ABC News it “sickens” her to think what might happen if Moore is elected to the U.S. Senate.
“It sickens me to wonder what may go on with...

It’s amazing to me that the government keeps such good track of it’s funds that every department runs out of money on the same day, even at the same hour.

Seriously, first of all, pass a budget (maybe more than one a decade), but secondly; stop pretending that the National Park Service has no money in the account, or the IRS doesn’t have any cash. These places don’t operate with exactly tuned down to the penny budgets, hell the Consumer Finance Board was running a 177 million dollar surplus on a 145 million dollar budget, do they close down? We already know they have the money. Think a department with a billion dollar budget might have enough in the account to run through a long weekend?

My understanding is the CRs allow the government to allocate more money, or more importantly the law says the government can’t spend money not allocated by Congress, but if it’s already there, then it’s all theater. Which it is anyway, since people get paid for the furloughed time off most of the time anyway, oddly enough the more you make the more likely you are to get your back pay.

Got into a knock down drag out on Facebook about who’s fault the shutdown was. I’m like the fault of the people who wouldn’t vote for the CR. You can argue whether it’s worth it to hold up the CR, but who did it is obvious. Every Republican (Including the ones who didn’t vote for it), and every democrat that voted for it is still only 55 votes, need 60. And his comment was that the Republicans should have killed the Filibuster… from there it went really stupid.

Also, who’s ready for the FISA memo disclosure? Can we get that out while the government is shut down?

So I have a NASA meeting scheduled. But if there’s a shutdown, no meeting. Which I get. But get this: government staff isn’t allowed to tell people that meeting are canceled or rescheduled. Because zero work is allowed.
Seems silly.

The Deep State. I know it’s something a lot of people make fun of, but sometimes the same people post some article about a member of whatever department being part of the #Resist movement, with no irony.

The fact that more than 80% of the IRS donates to Democrat causes and then targets conservative groups, or the State Department being even more liberal and fighting Trump, scares me a bit. Who the heck is actually in charge? If Trump and Congress said do X, it won’t necessarily happen.

On top of all this, the 9th circuit is always happy to take anyone’s cause to stop whatever is going on.

Wait, I’ve been told time after time that teh Dreamers are Americans, that many don’t even know they are illegal, they don’t speak their native tongue or know their homeland except as any American knows Mexico… yet, in order to pander to them you spoke in Spanish?

WTF? Way to lose the narrative there bro.

In other news, Trump does exactly what he said he would and then some. Offered a path to citizenship, doubled the number of Dreamers, tightened up immigration laws, brought them in line with the rest of the world, and asked for a mere (hah) 25 billion for the wall… and Democrats scoff and walk away.

What exactly is it they are accomplishing right now? They can’t stop anything, they don’t want to start anything that anyone else wants to see. The Black Caucus sat during the announcement that black unemployment is at an all time low… What’s the plan here, hold their breath until the Warren/Kennedy presidency?

Dunno, I’m not an expert on the border, but I’ve seen people who should know what they are talking about go both ways on this. When border agents and their bosses can’t agree on it and it’s so politically charged I’m not sure what to think.

It does seem a bit too easy to cross in some places. I’d trade a wall for stopping immigration checks on the highway in random places.

We’ve been beginning to wonder if Trump is secretly anarcho-capitalist. Make government a complete and total farce, wait for it to break down… he’s just trying for the most exploitative route to get there.

He’s paying more attention to the checks and balances than his two predecessors. Obama frequently stated that if Congress didn’t do what he wanted them to he’d just do it with an executive order or regulatory change, that’s why we got DACA and Net Neutrality. Two things that should have been decided by Congress that they chickened out on and he unlawfully decided. Bush asked Congress if he could declare war on something that isn’t beatable in a strict sense. Terrorism will go on as long as you want it to, it’s a question of what the end goal was, and there wasn’t one stated. That’s how Obama was bombing multiple countries at once without approval, “It’s the war on terror” is the gold card here.

And with the FBI showing it hasn’t changed much since they gave the Clinton administration Bush and Reagan’s files back in the 90’s it’s bringing up the fact that something like 80% of the government votes Democrat, and over 95% of departments like the IRS, State, and office workers of the FBI. And most have unions that negotiate with themselves for their benefits and firing practices. It can take two civil trials to fire an employee at some of these places. No wonder you get crap like the IRS targeting Tea Party groups and the FBI fighting the election.

He’s paying more attention to the checks and balances than his two predecessors. Obama frequently stated that if Congress didn’t do what he wanted them to he’d just do it with an executive order or regulatory change, that’s why we got DACA and Net Neutrality.

…,But at the same time, ignoring things he liked that were nearly unanimously voted in by Congress, like sanctions against Russia?

…,But at the same time, ignoring things he liked that were nearly unanimously voted in by Congress, like sanctions against Russia?

How long ago was the resolution voted on, and signed into law, to recognize Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel? Presidents pull this shit all the time. And most of these laws are written with ways for the President to weasel out, this one includes a waiver system.

I really don’t get all of this. We’re destroying Russia’s economy with the additional resource production and keeping oil down below $100 a barrel, it’s obvious that the actual policies he supports are not good for Russia. Does he think that implementing the sanctions would add his own weight to the allegations that the election was tampered with?